In 2013, the filmmaker Quin Mathews examined the tumultuous political and social atmosphere in Dallas leading up to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in the documentary, City of Hate: Dallas and the Assassination. A decade later, he has returned to the subject.
The film is composed almost entirely of new footage, including Mathews’ personal recollections of seeing JFK just before the assassination. One of the most compelling aspects of this new version is how Mathews shares his own experiences with the camera, having seen Kennedy at Dallas Love Field Airport the day of the assassination.
Tragedies that occurred over the last decade pulled him back into the story. Mass shootings connected to North Texas—like in El Paso, a racist attack that was carried out by a shooter from Collin County, and the Allen outlet mall—pushed Mathews to reassess the history of violence and injustice in his hometown. A special cut of City of Hate: Dallas and the Assassination 60 Years Later will premiere at the Dallas International Film Festival.
“I always thought there was the extremism in Dallas in the 1960s and Dallas has improved so much that it [no longer has any] relation to the actual assassination. But I can’t dismiss it,” he says. “I can’t dismiss the connection, that when you have an atmosphere where there is a vocal element that seems to prompt other people to commit acts of violence, or to instigate a feeling of hate, that it does have consequences.”
It’s rare that a filmmaker revisits a subject the way Mathews has with City of Hate, but he felt that he still had more to say. An animating force of Mathews’ project is the idea that the president’s assassination did not occur in a vacuum; it was one link, albeit a significant one, in a long chain of events that illustrate a darker side of Dallas’s history. He argues this still resonates today.
He was hesitant to insert himself, however. The filmmaker Bart Weiss, who was the executive producer on the project, encouraged Mathews to share his story in front of the camera, calling it “personal filmmaking.” Mathews agreed on the condition that Weiss be the one to interview him for those segments.
“He was there, and this affected him greatly,” Weiss says. “Quin makes objective documentaries. He is not somebody who puts himself into the work. And so this was different from him. It makes [the film] ring in a much deeper way than it would if his story was not in it.”
Weiss says that Mathews has produce a new argument of how the Kennedy assassination fits into Dallas’ legacy. “Most of the time, when we see films about the Kennedy assassination, you leave it in the past. And I think what his film does is [it] brings the context of what was there to the present.”
Of course, Mathews is not the only one who shares his story in City of Hate. Other interviewees provide their own views on the history of Dallas, the assassination itself, and how the city’s temperament has, or has not, changed since 1963. Early in the documentary, Mathews points out that 60 years later, the number of people who were alive during the assassination has declined precipitously, making his effort to capture these stories especially poignant.
Lisa Hembry, the former county treasurer, speaks about her experiences being one of “the last people on the face of the Earth to see President Kennedy alive.” Mathews learned that she was a student of Roosevelt High School in Oak Cliff at the time of the shooting, which had opened a few months earlier. The city labeled it at the time a “Negro high school,” nine years after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in schools.
The fact that there were still segregated schools opening almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education is, in City of Hate, another link in the chain of shameful events that exist alongside the Kennedy assassination in the city’s history.
The DIFF screening will not be the first time Mathews has shown the movie to a crowd. Previous screenings have provided an opportunity for locals to share their own experiences regarding the legacy of JFK’s assassination and broader systemic issues that fed into and continued in the years after it occurred.
“We have had two screenings before. One was at the Central Library, one was at North Haven Methodist Church,” says Mathews. “The auditorium [at the library] was filled and [the Q&A] went on for an hour-and-a-half. The one at North Haven Methodist Church went on for an hour ‘til they cut it off. So people have something to contribute, I mean, equally as valid as anything in the film.”
City of Hate was conceived as a television film for broadcast on PBS stations in Texas, meaning viewers would engage with it alone at home. Weiss sees the upcoming DIFF screening as an opportunity for audiences to process the powerful emotions it can stir up with others. “The Q&As after this film are lengthy and emotional,” he says. “And it’s powerful, having this at a festival gives an opportunity to have a discussion. I imagine people will go out in the lobby and talk about [the film] for quite a bit longer afterwards.”
While City of Hate draws attention to aspects of Dallas’s past and present that residents may be happier to ignore, Mathews still has a lot of love for the city.
“I don’t think Dallas is overall a ‘city of hate,’” he says. “I am not negative about Dallas in any sort of way, other than the traffic’s bad. But I think we have to honestly acknowledge history, whatever that is. And some of it is uncomfortable. Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, and we have to know the foundation of our existence in our culture.”
Tickets for the DIFF screening of City of Hate: Dallas and the Assassination 60 Years Later can be purchased here. If you would like to view more of Quin Mathews’ work, you can do so here.
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